Gigabit WLAN tech to shoulder Wireless DisplayPort

Vesa, the organisation behind DisplayPort, has selected the Wireless Gigabit Alliance's 60GHz networking technology as the basis for a future wireless version of the digital monitor cabling standard.

Wireless Gigabit - aka WiGig - can provide data links of up to 7Gb/s over a 10m range. That's no sufficient bandwidth to deliver the full DisplayPort experience. DP 1.2 supports data rates of up to 21.6Gb/s over four lanes, but WiGig's peak capacity is enough for a single lane of DP traffic, itself plenty for a hi-res display at 60Hz.

WiGig is primarily a network technology, but its creators have been sufficiently savvy to see the technology's applicability to point-to-point links, not least because they're pitching the would-be standard as a universal wireless data transmission system.

So today the WiGig Alliance announced WiGig A/V, a protocol adaption layer (PAL) which will allow traffic from systems like DisplayPort to be routed over WiGig links, is now "feature complete". Ditto WiGig I/O, a PAL for sending serial bus data over a WiGig network.

Both are now defined in the sense that the Alliance knows what each PAL will do. It now has to detail how the PAL functionality will be delivered, and for these final specs, we'll have to wait until "early 2011".

WiGig is also being feted as the basis for the next version of Wi-Fi. It is already designed to smoothly switch hardware to 802.11n when the range reaches beyond that 10m limit. ®